Joyce Carol Oates' startling new collection of stories brings us back to familiar Oates territory. Lurking everywhere is a palpable sense of violence and fear, broken hearts and souls, shattered families.

In one story, a couple's seemingly good marriage implodes as they are confronted by a random act of violence. In another tale, a sensitive young girl becomes the innocent victim of her mother's overwhelming grief as she watches her eldest daughter slip into the deep recesses of autism. In yet another, two estranged sisters revisit ancient conflicts and tensions as their father lay dying.

In one of the finest narratives in this collection, a narcissistic mother harangues her lonely teenage son, whom she has, for the most part, abandoned, by suddenly smothering him with aggressive psychobabble that humiliates him and prompts him to lash out.

Oates has publicly stated that her writing is not autobiographical. Yet one of her own finely crafted characters, the artist Serena, admits, "All poets secret their deepest selves in their art. The person you are likely to meet is but an imposter."

The story "Suicide by Fitness Center" may strike some readers as possibly providing some clues to Oates' own inner darkness. It is about a middle-age woman, whose physical description uncannily resembles that of Oates, who spends many of her afternoons at a dreary strip mall gymnasium where she decides she is going to kill herself by going too fast on the treadmill. We watch her watching the others, repulsed by their flabbiness and their neediness; their desperate attempts to erase time. One man attracts her. She approaches him and is rebuffed, and recoils painfully inside herself, more determined than ever to act out her plan.

The narrator here, perhaps like Oates, lives uncomfortably with the perpetual feeling of being an outsider, someone odd and different, a bit elitist but eaten up by her own loneliness.

In Joyce Carol Oates' universe, there are no easy answers or neat resolutions. Life is never fair. People tend to swoop down upon each other like predators and disappear just as quickly. Disappointment lurks everywhere. This astonishingly talented writer understands that the nexus of family life is bloodstained and bitter but, like a restless insomniac, she can't avert her gaze.

Elaine Margolin is a freelance writer from Hewlett, N.Y.

Now's the time to be your brother's keeper

The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
Peter Singer
Random House, 206 pp., $22

REVIEWED BY JOHN FREEMAN

For a number of years now, social scientists have been saying it's not only possible to alleviate poverty, but to end it all together. Princeton philosopher Peter Singer is often ahead of the curve, so he has been in this camp for almost 30 years. As he points out in the introduction of his stirring new book, the proportion of people who cannot meet their daily needs in the world is the lowest it has ever been. There are also more people in the world than ever with excess.

And yet, 27,000 children die every day of preventable diseases. It is an unacceptable horror. In one decade, this ongoing failure to creatively attack poverty has piled up more deaths than all the wars of human history combined. It is this figure -- not the equation mentioned above -- which Singer uses as a powerful rhetorical wedge. We can solve extreme poverty now, not just because of our new technology, we can solve it because as moral beings we have to.

Singer sets up a demanding ethical compass for human behavior in "The Life You Can Save." Like all philosophers, he is fond of thought experiments. Here's one: Say you are walking by a pond where a child is probably drowning. Saving the boy will make you late for work and most certainly ruin your new Italian loafers. Do you run into the water or walk by?

These are very black and white stories, but their effect on this little book is powerful and clarifying. Here's another one: The average American can meet his basic food needs by working two hours a day. As a result, a large portion of what the middle and upper classes do make is spent on discretionary items. When we buy a coffee on the street, rather than make it at home, we are effectively making a moral choice not to help a starving child.

Singer writes clear and lucid prose of a teacherly bent. He makes a statement and then anticipates the reader's questions. In this fashion, "The Life You Can Save" is an effective rhetorical sally into this urgent problem. Singer debates and dismisses, quite handily, so much of the resistance to radical new solutions to poverty without ever belittling the circumstances of those caught up in its grip.

He also ends with a very sensible plan for how to raise the necessary capital to meet the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals without resorting to the same kind of aid packages, which have arguably kept developing countries poor. It's not a tax, or a tithe, but a graph which shows how just 10 percent of American families could eradicate extreme poverty. It gives new meaning to "Yes, we can."

John Freeman is the American editor of Granta magazine.

It was tough to say they were sorry
The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America
Susan Wise Bauer
Princeton University Press, 336 pp., $26.95

REVIEWED BY KATHLEEN DALEY

Crisis managers insist that a public apology is de rigueur if one is caught doing wrong. But such an apology can take many forms. And that is what Susan Bauer examines in this scholarly look at the mea culpas of some of our nation's most prominent scoundrels.

Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy and Bernard Cardinal Law, reigning bishop of Boston, got low marks for their performances. Kennedy was involved in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969. In 2002, Law had to explain his failure to stop the sexual exploitation of children by one of his priests. Bauer blames their Catholic upbringing, rooted in the theology of the privacy promised in the sacrament of confession, for their failing grades.

It is in the context of the history of religion in this democratic country that Bauer weighs the carefully crafted explanations of President Grover Cleveland, who fathered an illegitimate child; President Jimmy Carter, who had "lust in his heart;" and President Bill Clinton, of Monica Lewinsky fame.

Aimee Semple McPherson, Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, Protestant preachers all, took the stage of public shame. McPherson aced it. The other two should have done as well. The trick was to understand the difference between an apology and a confession. Those who didn't identify with the congregation that believed in them and had the power to forgive flunked.

In this warm, satisfying exploration of food, cooking and memory, the eight students in Lillian's cooking class learn recipes and deeper truths about themselves and each other. Lillian's teaching style blends fancy, intuition and nourishing wisdom. She encourages students, from a teenage waitress to a widower to a long-married couple, to trust themselves and savor the way food spurs memory.

Erica Bauermeister blends honest characters with evocative food writing. With mouthwatering, prose, Bauermeister shifts focus seamlessly in each chapter, to reach back into the lives of Lillian and her students, exploring the smells, tastes and past loves that bring them into the class. On par with cinematically sensual novels such as Laura Esquivel's "Like Water For Chocolate," 'The School for Essential Ingredients" is a beautiful fusion of food and memory. Readers can practically taste the roasted crabs, gourmet Thanksgiving dinner and spicy pasta sauce Bauermeister describes. This wonderful, delicious novel's only flaw is the omission of recipes.

While My Sister Sleeps
Barbara Delinsky
Doubleday, 336 pp., $25.95

When young Olympic hopeful marathoner Robin Snow collapses from a heart attack on a practice run, the structure of her family collapses, too. Her guilt-stricken sister, Molly, becomes the family's anchor. Her mother, Kathryn, keeps anguished vigil as Robin lies in a deep coma.

Best-selling author Barbara Delinsky writes the family's shock and grief with dignity, without resorting to voyeurism or melodrama. Delinsky works most closely with Molly and Kathryn's perspectives, but occasionally shifts to husband Charlie or brother Chris. Chris's struggle to share his grief with his wife, Erin, is honestly written, emotionally stunted with hope for growth.

Men outside the family do not fare so well in subplots. Manipulative journalist Nick's redemptive turnaround happens so abruptly, it feels pat. David, the Good Samaritan who found Robin, is welcomed surprisingly easily into the Snows' close-knit family circle.

The greatest strength of this nuanced novel is the slowly unfolding detail of the narrative as the Snow family grieves, learns acceptance and grows closer.

First Daughter
Eric Van Lustbader
Forge Books, 400 pp., $25.95

"First Daughter" is more nuanced than the usual fast-paced political thriller. Van Lustbader, known for his continuation of Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne novels, uses the search for a criminal mastermind to explore larger themes like parents' grief, tensions between church and state, and a young man's struggle with dyslexia. The result is a substantial and thoughtful mystery that keeps the plot twists coming.

Dyslexia grants ATF agent Jack McClure surprising flashes of insight in his search for the president-elect's kidnapped daughter, Alli. A keen visual sense gives him an intuitive grasp of crime scenes, but he wrestles with his secret disability.

The incumbent president is a devout man, keen to keep religion at the forefront of government. As the tension surrounding Alli's disappearance mounts, the incumbent's administration tries to use the secular humanist movement as a scapegoat.

This complex and ambitious novel successfully blends history, psychology, politics and suspense into a rich, textured story. Readers will want to see more of McClure.

The Way Through Doors
Jesse Ball
Vintage Books, 240 pp., $13.95

"The Way Through Doors" presents an endless spiral of stories folding in and out of one another. Pamphleteer Selah Morse lands a powerful job as a ministry inspector. His duties take him all over the city, on errands laden with whimsy and surrealism.

He rescues a young woman who has lost her memory. Posing as her boyfriend in the hospital, he is instructed to take her home and tell her stories to help her piece together who she is. These stories fold in on themselves or peter out into mystery, leaving the reader breathless and perplexed. Rather than trying to wrestle these nested stories into linear logic, it's best to go with the flow.

Treat this novel like a collection of fairy tales or even poetry. Tales of a fiddle-playing dog, a jealous gambler, and even Selah himself, are haunting as they ebb and flow through their own internal logic, inviting the reader on a journey of image and symbolism that only hints at resolution.

Bruno, Chief of Police
Martin Walker
Knopf, 288 pp., $24.95

As much a love letter to the French countryside as it is a small town mystery, this enjoyable novel tells the story of a grisly hate crime that shocks the sleepy town of St. Denis in France's Perigord region. Police chief Benoit Courreges, known to his colleagues, his rugby team and his tennis students as Bruno, cherishes his small-town life. When a local Muslim man is murdered, French law enforcement, detectives and press swarm the small town. Only Bruno understands both his superiors' perspective on solving the crime, and the loyalties, friendships, old feuds and rich history of St. Denis.

Martin Walker combines a methodically paced mystery with vibrant atmospheric descriptions of Bruno's everyday life. Historical and religious questions add depth without weighing down the story. Walker captures French village life and cuisine so perfectly that readers will be eager to explore St. Denis and the surrounding countryside with Bruno as their guide. Hopefully, Bruno's adventures will continue across future novels.